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A simple plan to dissolve Facebook, Google, and Amazon, from the man who coined the term "net neutrality"
https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2018/11/8/18076440/facebook-monopoly-curse-of-bigness-tim-wu-interview
At what cost to Amazon’s employees? Is it worth it to trade the quality of life of an Amazon fulfillment worker with horrendous conditions just so someone can have things trucked out to their rural home? Don’t get me wrong—Amazon has some useful and high quality products/services. But, assessing corporations on something like 'net good' is not a great metric. What if a company cured all diseases, but in order to do so, needed to enslave 40% of the population? Net good? Yeah. Justified? Depends on which side of that 40/60 split you landed in.
This isn't really something you can blame Amazon for though, the logic of evolutionary markets says if they aren't as efficient as possible they'll be deposed by another company that is.
Web shopping with efficient logistics to your door is just a better system than brick and mortar stores with idle sales people milling about.
The people to blame are the politicians who allow inhumane employment and below subsistence minimum wages with no negative income tax to keep people from poverty.
Fulfillment centers are just one aspect of Amazon that is worrying. They continue to not police knock-off versions of items on their store. So, basically taking a middle-man’s cut for fraud. There’s plenty not to like about Amazon’s business practices. Is that a reason to break them up? Maybe not. But I think they should at least be regulated more thoroughly so they can’t screw so many people over. When the article talks about a 'gilded age', the issue is really exploitation and inequality. And Amazon seems poised to capitalize on maximal inequality.
I absolutely agree, the point I'm trying to make is you don't fix this by saying "Amazon should be nicer, people should boycott nasty companies!". All that will happen is some company better at hiding its nastyness will come along.
If you want systematic change you need systematic enforcement and the way this works best is via government regulation.
Ugh! It’s great to hear government officers admitting mistakes. But it’s disheartening to think when we’ll possibly get anyone else in a position of power to rectify this. If WhatsApp was broken off back to its own company, couldn’t Facebook just keep all the advertising deals and WhatsApp would just go out of business trying to carry the weight of the growth it’s undergone while not having its original leadership? This seems like possibly an irreversible process. Seems like Amazon and Google are similar. It seems too late to fix this. (Though I can imagine Trump trying to break up Amazon for the wrong reasons.)
This is such a laughing-stock of an article for so many reasons.
Amazon's made it semi-viable to live in small areas again, net good. It's also made reading make sense for a lot of people who wouldn't be reading otherwise by popularising e-books. It's invented some amazing open-source libraries. Hell, it even managed to give Salesforce serious competition.
Stupid take. Amazon coming into the ad game wouldn't do a thing; Apple tried, Apple failed, a company that doesn't own a bit of any major platform will fail too.
Again, stupid take. Google isn't dependent on AWS more or less at all. They run one of the main competitors, for Christ's sake! Zero dependence.
Hell, just this month it was announced how Microsoft - Microsoft, of all companies - managed to win against Amazon in cloud revenue, office products-excluded.
Don't get me wrong, Ezra Klein's pretty cool, but some of the people he allows to write for Vox are jokes. Look at this person's bylines, for example! I don't get it. So, so stupid.
I think Amazon actually has a shot at doing something with ads. First, they have possible spaces to put ads, e.g. twitch or Prime Video. Second, most important, that have a vast inventory of ads.
If you own a website you can put on Amazon ads easily. You can take any Amazon product and turn it into a banner ad for a site people already trust and probably use. Your visitors can make an easy purchase and you get a portion of the sale.
If you think about the Amazon Basics brands, Amazon might be making a product, selling it on their website, and advertising it via their ad platform.
If you want to have any impact, make privacy the default policy on everything. No one is allowed to open my mail box and read my mail. Default privacy policy back to that standard. Ad tracking is a wonderful back door policy to track everyone all the time.